Aircraft

Saab’s J21 was among the few aircraft produced in both piston engine and turbojet versions. To most Americans, the name SAAB brings to mind a line of modish and distinctively Swedish auto­mobiles. It might come as a surprise that Saab...

A Mitsubishi Zero shot down at Pearl Harbor revealed surprisingly few facts about the mysterious fighter, but did yield a map that provided tantalizing clues about the location of the Japanese fleet. Shortly before 8 a.m. on December 7,...

Artist-engineer Alexander Lippisch conceived more than 50 radical aircraft designs, including the Nazis’ rocket-powered Me-163. Few aircraft configurations are more familiar than the delta wing, which dominated the sky for many years,...

Vought’s versatile Kingfisher served as a gun spotter, patrol plane, anti-submarine scout, utility transport and trainer, but downed aircrews remembered it best as an “angel on floats” Legendary World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker...

The Sky My Kingdom: Memoirs of the Famous German World War II Test Pilot by Hanna Reitsch, 2009 edition from Casemate, Philadelphia, Pa., $29.95. I first read this autobiography sometime in the 1950s, and then again in the 1970s, after...

LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak, Regnery, Washington, D.C., 2009, $27.95. Curtis LeMay remains one of the most controversial figures in American history. His reputation as an unrepentant destroyer of Nazi...

Flying For Her Country: The American and Soviet Women Military Pilots of World War II by Amy Goodpaster Strebe, Potomac Books, Dulles, Va., 2009, $15.95. Historian and journalist Amy Strebe, who has researched America’s Women...

Long before the United States officially entered World War II, it was the world’s biggest exporter of fighter aircraft. From early 1938 through the end of 1941, the United States, though still technically neutral in the conflict that was...

A young aviation machinist’s mate and a veteran Japanese Zero pilot squared off at Pearl Harbor. Only one would survive. The date December 7, 1941, had been etched in my father’s memory, as it had for so many of his generation. Decades...

Adolphe Pégoud enjoyed international fame even before World War I. The fighter ace—that dead-eyed hotshot who has downed five or more adversaries in aerial combat—is an iconic figure of the air age. The term derives from the French...

Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith’s famous Fokker Southern Cross has pride of place in Brisbane. At Brisbane Airport, not far from where today’s jumbo jets touch down after their transpacific flights, the Fokker F.VIIb/3m trimotor Southern...

Aussie Sabre Returns to the Air You might not recognize the fighter designator “CA-27,” but think F-86: The CA-27 was the hotrod Australian version of the North American Sabre, built by Commonwealth Aircraft, the Melbourne company that...

North American’s T-6: A Definitive History of the World’s Most Famous Trainer by Dan Hagedorn, Specialty Press, North Branch, Minn., 2009, $32.95. Using the word “definitive” in a title is risky, but this beautiful volume...

Pfc. Dan Bullock died at age 15 in 1969 and efforts to recognize the young African-American Marine continue and are highlighted in this Military Times documentary. (Rodney Bryant and Daniel Woolfolk/Military Times)...

Confederate Colonel John Salmon Ford made Texas his home for nearly 30 years. In May 1865, with the end of the war nearing, Union troops hoped they had seen the last of him. They weren’t so lucky, as they found out at Palmito Ranch, in...

Vasily Vereshchagin put himself in harm’s way to paint war as he saw it. In the process he became a pacifist...

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